A service provider or operator of a network often desires the ability to control the amount of data that a flow can send and/or receive over a network such that the flow receives at least a predetermined, minimum amount of upstream and/or downstream bandwidth and, potentially, can utilize excess upstream and/or downstream bandwidth above the minimum amount when available. Control schemes exist for achieving these objectives. The control schemes meter packets of the flow to be sent upstream and/or downstream to determine whether they are in conformance with a service agreement (and at what level of conformance with the service agreement) and drop those packets to be sent upstream and/or downstream that are not in conformance.
Typically, these control schemes use two or more counters for each flow sending and/or receiving data over the network that is to be metered, where a flow is a broad term that can include, for example, packets of data from one or more subscribers and/or from one or more subscriber applications running on devices. In some instances, a large number of flows and their respective data are desired to be metered, which requires a large number of counters that consume power and chip space in an integrated circuit implementation.
The embodiments of the present disclosure will be described with reference to the accompanying drawings. The drawing in which an element first appears is typically indicated by the leftmost digit(s) in the corresponding reference number.